You’ve already heard, I’m sure, about Delbert Belton, the 88-year-old World War II veteran who was beaten to death by two black teenagers. The police are assuring everyone that there’s no need to get worried, because this wasn’t a race crime. Instead, it was Delbert’s own fault. According to the police, when the boys tried to rob Delbert, he had the temerity to fight back, leaving them with no other option than to beat an old man to death.

A friend of mine noted that, using this reasoning, if one assumes solely for the sake of argument that the race-hustlers are correct and it was Zimmerman who started the fatal encounter with Trayvon, then Trayvon was responsible for his own death because he had the temerity to fight backby climbing on top of Zimmerman, raining punches on his face, and trying to turn Zimmerman’s head into Silly Putty by smashing it repeatedly into the pavement. My friend is right, of course.

But I’ll add something else to the mix. The police are desperate to avoid saying that the white on black crimes that are flooding the news lately arise because blacks are — gasp! — not merely racist in Obama’s hystically race-conscious America, but aggressively so. They don’t want to admit that the aggressive focus on race that surrounded Obama’s election didn’t destroy forever the linger vestiges of racism in America — the presumed outcome of a nation open-minded enough to elect a black man to its highest office — but, in fact, created an aggressive form of black-on-white racism.

Here’s the problem: the new black-on-white racial motivation, although disgusting, is an intellectually recognizable reason for vile conduct. If you deny its existence, all you have left is the admission that American blacks have become feral. That is, they’re not killing for political reasons; they’re killing because they have an animal’s blood-lust, without a human’s self-control, morality, or reasoning skills.

And so, let’s talk about two recent local news stories that the MSM is assiduously ignoring.

Police say the youth lived within in a block of the woman’s house. Investigators say he broke into her home by kicking in the back door and then sexually assaulted her.

The 93-year-old had been sleeping at the time and awoke to find the youth in her bedroom.

Apparently elderly white women are quite the hot commodity amongst the non-racist blacks, because a similar event occurred happened in Poughkeepsie, NY. That’s where 99-year-old Fannie Gumbinger had the misfortune to cross paths with 20-year-old Javon Tyrek Rogers, a black man who is a career burglar. Well, Mrs. Gumbinger didn’t actually cross paths with Rogers. It was more a case of his entering her house and killing her. Why would one kill a frail 99-year-old lady (and believe me, because of my Mom’s retirement home I know precisely how frail 99-year-old ladies are)? Well, it wasn’t a “hate crime,” of course, because blacks don’t commit hate crimes. That means, as Wolf Howling put it, that it was a “feral” act.

The race hustlers have repeatedly put themselves in the position of conceding that black Americans are feral, whether it’s because they say that Damian King couldn’t help trying to beat Reginald Denny to death in the wake of the Rodney King riots, because he was “caught him the rapture” of the moment; or the two teens who couldn’t help killing an 88-year-old because he fought back; or a 17-year-old who couldn’t control his lust for an 93-year-old woman (who his lust for power over a 93-year-old woman); or a 20-year-old who had to murder a 99-year-old lady who was interfering with his burglary; or the five young blacks who tortured a random white couple to death in such a horrible way that I can’t bear to right about it. If these young black people (and they’re all young products of America’s thirty years of institutional Progressivism) acted without a motive, no matter how disgusting that motive was, then the only thing left is to concede that they are either evil incarnate, which argues a certain moral knowledge that the actor deliberately ignores, or that they are so inhuman that they have become like animals.

Even likening them to animals, though, seems to me to be too generous. Animals kill to eat or to control territory. Animals do not waste their energies, nor do they put themselves at risk, simply to indulge in blood lust. That type of act is seen only in rabid animals that have been rendered insane through infection.

So what disease has affected our black underclass to the point at which it has parted ways with humanity and entered dimensions in which, normally, only infected animals dwell? I leave you to think up your own instance.

Incidentally, I do not write this post as an overarching indictment of blacks, God forbid. I am not a classic racist, in that I do not believe that one race genetically inferior to another race. I recognize differences (skin color, musculature, bell curve spread over such traits as book-oriented intellectualism or physical stamina, etc), but I consider those differences virtuous, insofar as they provide a wonderful range of human abilities, with no one quality trumping any other — although there are times, whether through natural- or human-caused events, when certain traits may help one group survive better than another group. I consider myself a “values-ist,” meaning that I judge people by their values, not their skin color, religion, gender, sexual preference, etc.

So if it’s not genetics, it must be culture — and black culture is Leftist culture or, rather, black culture is the victim of elitist Leftist culture. It’s the Leftist ruling class, in government, in the media, and in education, taht thinks so little of blacks that these elites are content to accept that young blacks normally exist in a diseased, feral state, because it seems right and natural to the affluent Leftist eye. If, Gaia forfend!, they concede that blacks are endowed with the same moral and intellectual abilities as whites, then these same elites must also concede that blacks do not need to be perpetually dependent upon the states for all their needs, a status that assumes racial inability.

Just because your father was a great man doesn’t mean you will be a great man. Exhibit A for this truism is Martin Luther King III, son of the great racial harmonizer, Martin Luther King Jr. Standing in Washington, D.C., where his father stood 50 years ago to state that people should be judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, MLK III proved himself to be just another two-bit race hustler. And so a dream dies in one generation.

Several thousand people gathered in Washington today to remember Martin Luther King Jr’s brilliant “I have a dream” speech, which he delivered exactly fifty years ago this month. In stirring tones, the elder King set forth his vision of an America in which people are judged, not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

Martin Luther King, Jr., a Republican, would have wept if he had lived long enough to see what the Democrat party has done to his legacy. His greatest sorrow might have been that his son, Martin Luther King III, has turned his back on his father’s inclusive, color-blind ideology, and become one with the race hustlers.

This is pretty strong language, but it’s the truth. Here is what Martin Luther King III said as he stood where his father had once stood.

And so I stand here today in this sacred place, in my father’s footsteps. I am humbled by the heavy hand of history. But more than that, I, like you, continue to feel his presence. I, like you, continue to hear his voice crying out in the wilderness.

The admonition is clear: this is not the time for a nostalgic commemoration, nor is this the time for self-congratulatory celebration. The task is not done. The journey is not complete. We can and we must do more.

The vision preached by my father a half century ago was that his four little children will one day live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content up their character. However, sadly, the tears of Trayvon Martin’s mother and father remind us that far too frequently, the color of one’s skin remains a license to profile, to arrest, and even to murder with no regard for the content of one’s character.

John Adams, another famous American, once said “Facts are stubborn things.” Here are a few facts to challenge MLK III’s infantile remonstrance against “racism” in America:

1. Content of character: The undisputed facts show that Trayvon Martin was a hulking thug who used drugs, played with guns, got into fights, skipped school, and talked trash. The same undisputed facts show that George Zimmerman was a neighborhood favorite who went the extra mile for everyone, regardless of the color of their skin – so much so that he spent enormous time trying to help a young black man he believed the police had unjustly targeted.

2. Stand Your Ground laws: Neither the prosecution nor the defense breathed a word about Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law (also known as the Castle doctrine). Instead, this was an out-and-out case of old-fashioned self-defense. The evidence showed that Trayvon was sitting on top of Zimmerman trying to bash his brains out on the pavement. Zimmerman didn’t have the choice of standing his ground or trying to flee when he was shot. The situation had devolved in “it’s either him or me.”

3. There was no profiling. Police profile. Zimmerman is not a police officer. He is an ordinary citizen. Ordinary citizens observe, make decisions, and react as they see fit. You cannot enact federal laws imposing on all ordinary citizens some bizarre standard by which they’re not allowed to defend themselves against black aggressors, because to do so is “profiling.”

The only thing the MLK III got right is that racism lives today. But the racism in the Zimmerman case wasn’t Zimmerman’s racism against Trayvon. Every bit of evidence introduced at trial or revealed by fact-finders showed that George Zimmerman was a mixed-race man who treated all races with respect.

The real racism in this case was that shown by the race hustler’s in the Democrat party and the media (but I repeat myself), who made the decision to lynch George Zimmerman during that brief window of time when they thought he was white. Even when they were corrected, and learned that Zimmerman self-identifies as Hispanic, they created a bizarre new racial classification called “white-Hispanic” so that they could play out their revolting racist fantasies against him.

Martin Luther King (did I mention he was a Republican?) would be shocked at the way in which his son and the Democrat party have perverted his color-blind message and turned it into as aggressive a form of anti-white racism as was ever practiced in the old days in the anti-black south.

This post poses a very provocative, even inflammatory, question: “Is the mainstream media the spiritual heir of Charles Manson?” Will you be too surprised if I answer “yes”?

Let’s start with Charles Manson. Manson had a goal: he envisioned a new world order, with himself and his followers as the leaders. To bring about this new world order, he first had to destroy the existing one. He came up with an idea that he called “Helter-Skelter“: he was going to incite race warfare because he was pretty sure that would bring America down, leaving room for him and his followers to take over. He figured that the best way to start an apocalyptic race war was through violent murder. He wasn’t going to do the murder himself, of course, but he did incite his dumb, sexually-opiated, often drugged followers to commit the deeds on his behalf.

Now, let’s think about the mainstream media. The MSM has a goal: a completely Democrat-dominated political machine, with the MSM and the politicians it’s created in total control. Because this will be a statist new world, the MSM must first destroy completely America’s current, still vaguely capitalist market and individualist ideology. To that end, the media has decided that it will incite race warfare, because it’s pretty sure that race warfare will destroy existing institutions and allow it and its political class to take over. Media members figure that the best way to start this societal breakdown is to sow so much division between blacks and whites in America that the country becomes dysfunctional and, if necessary, bloodied. The media elite are not going to sully their own hands, of course, but they will work hard to incite their followers to commit the deeds on their behalf. (And sadly, to the extent they have followers in black inner cities, these are young people who are minimally educated, inundated with unhealthy sexual messages from movies and rap songs, and too often on drugs. Just think of Trayvon….)

I can’t prove the MSM’s goal, but I can prove its tactics.

Exhibit A is the way the MSM has used Obama’s presidency to paint every single American who opposes his politics as “racist” — so much so that the MSM dictionary defines “racist” as “someone who expresses any disagreement with Obama’s policies or conduct while in office.” Since roughly 50% of the country doesn’t like what he’s doing at any given time, 50% of the country is therefore by definition racist. (Here’s just one example, but it’s remarkably easy to cull dozens or even hundreds.)

This “opposing Obama” message is pounded home through relentlessly repeated and embroidered stories about rodeo clowns; Obama’s fellowship with murdered black teens; and even the obscenity of referring to Obama as “Obama,” rather than as President Obama. By the way, this last one is a dilly, because Chris Matthews, rather than admitting that other presidents have been called “Carter,” “Reagan,” “Bush,” “Dubya,” or “Clinton,” compares the casual approach to Obama’s name to the way non-believers refer to Jesus Christ as “Jesus” or “Christ.” Wow. Just . . . wow.

Exhibit B is the racial incitement that permeated every bit of the MSM’s coverage of George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin shooting. It began when NBC doctored Zimmerman’s 911 call to make it sound as if he was a racist; picked up steam when the media coined the phrase “white-Hispanic” to cover-up their problem when they discovered that Zimmerman identified as Hispanic; entered the world of farce when the media only reluctantly revealed, when trial court motions made it impossible to ignore, that Martin wasn’t a 12-year-old choirboy but was, instead a husky, drug-using, gun- and violence-obsessed, thug; and just kept rolling with homages to hoodies and Skittles. Bill Whittle does the best summary I’ve seen of the media’s “hi-tech” lynching of a non-black man:

Exhibit C: Oh, I don’t know. Take your pick. How about the new movie “The Butler,” which takes a real man’s quite distinguished and interesting life, and turns a star-powered movie into a parable about white and Republican racism? The director, incidentally, makes it clear that these racial accusations are no accident. Or maybe look at the way Oprah, the PETA-admiring “woman of the people,” makes a national incident out of her claim that a Swiss salesclerk was “racist” for suggesting that Oprah might like something cheaper than a $35,000 animal-skin purse.

Or maybe, as Rush pointed out, you just want to notice how the media completely ignores any violence that doesn’t fit in the narrative. Rush pointed to the recent murder of Chris Lane, a (white) baseball player from Australia who was shot dead by thug-addicted three teenagers because they were bored. Rush points out that the media assiduously refrained from commenting on the killers’ race (two were black and one is white, or white-Hispanic, or white-black, or whatever).

The media did exactly the same thing, incidentally, with the even more heinous 2007 murder of Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian in Knoxville, Tenn. That young (white) couple was so brutally murdered by five (black) people that it’s nauseating even to think about what was done to them. The killers outdid animals in their savagery, since they added a fiendish human imagination to their feral brutality. The national media said as little as possible about the murder and nothing about its racial implications.

Nothing restrained the media, however, when it went out of its way to destroy the lives of the (white) Duke lacrosse players after a (black) prostitute falsely accused them of rape. The media played that every day, every way, on every air or piece of paper over which it had control. When the players were vindicated, the media was remarkably silent, failing even to issue an apology for yet another “hi-tech” lynching.

The fall-out from the media’s relentless racial harangues is more racial tension in this country than at any time since the peak of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Despite the fact that there are no racially discriminatory federal laws in America; that there are no overtly racially discriminatory state laws in America; that there is a black man in the White House who got reelected (although Gawd alone knows why); and that compared to other nations in the world (including the Europe the Left so loves) America is a remarkably inclusive nation, blacks feel deeply that whites are bad people. By this I mean that blacks don’t simply note note that, occasionally and unfortunately, they have the misfortune to run into some idiot who spouts stone age nonsense. Instead, with relentless prompting from the mainstream media, they feel very strongly that whites view them negatively and are their enemy. As such, too many of them believe that whites, at most, destroyed and, at least, humiliated.

The MSM has worked its hard to convince blacks and many other minorities, including the LGBT crowd, Hispanics, and, increasingly, Asians that the status quo is bad for them, that there needs to be a new world order, and that the evil white people (excluding, of course, all the white people on MSNBC, NBC, CBS, ABC, the New York Times, the Washington Post, etc.), must be done away with.

And that is why I say that the MSM is the spiritual heir of Charles Manson. It’s “helter-skelter” all over again.

Now, Florida’s state capitol has announced that you (and you and you and you and you!) are Trayvon! This assault on American (and Floridan) integrity and decency takes the form of a painting unveiled at the state captiol, purporting to show a hooded figure being shot in the back of the head (which avoids the fact that Trayvon wasn’t running away but was, in fact, intensifying his full front assault) by a man who looks like a cross between George Zimmerman and Stalin. However, instead of seeing Trayvon’s face in the hoodie, it’s a mirror. (This ham-handed propaganda device somehow made me think of “Soylent Green” — you know, the bit where he says “It’s people!”):

In other words, says the State of Florida, we’re all drug addled thugs who try to beat people to death. Even worse, if you look at the wall sign behind the painting, it says that we’re looking at the Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame.

If you’d like to let the State of Florida know that you find this fact-free, racist at of political propaganda offensive, you can contact the capitol building at the building’s website. As always, remember that a polite, firmly worded message is effective. Obscenities, personal attacks, and threats only make you look bad and strengthen the other side’s sense of self-righteousness.

Here’s a concept to keep in the back of your mind as you read this post: Black people — especially black men — in America are murdered at a rate far greater than their representation in the American population. While blacks make up less than 13% of the population, more than 50% of those murdered in America are black (and, if you drill even further down, you’ll see these murders happen primarily in Democrat-run cities).

And now to my post….

Ebony magazine has hopped on the Trayvon Martin bandwagon by using four different covers for its current edition, all of them showing famous black men wearing hoodies.

Trayvon, of course, was wearing a hoody the night he attacked George Zimmerman and died as a result of that attack. The jury concluded that, given the undisputed evidence that Trayvon was attacking him, Zimmerman was acting in self-defense. Importantly, Florida has a self-defense law called “stand your ground,” which means that, if someone is threatening your life, you don’t have to try to run and hide — you can fight back, even if it means you kill the attacker. Neither the prosecution nor the defense referenced that law, but it existed as a subtext to the case.

On the right hand side of each celebrity cover, you can see the phrase “Repeal Stand Your Ground.” This reflects the fact that the race hustlers latched onto “stand your ground” as an inherently racist doctrine. In the world view they’re selling to American blacks, “stand your ground” laws are actually official permission to lynch black people.

Logical minds (that would include mine, of course), see a problem with the race hustlers’ world view: given that black man are proportionately more likely to be killed than any other group in America, it makes sense to give them the optimal ability to defend themselves against attempted murder. Absent that right, they are sitting ducks. The perpetrator thinks, “Hah! I’m going to shoot you regardless of any laws, because I don’t give a flying f*** about the law. But you — well, you might care about the law. That means that there’s a good chance that, if you’re even marginally law-abiding, you either won’t be armed to defend yourself or, if you’re armed, you’ll hesitate to act for fear of getting in trouble yourself — which gives me enough time to shoot you dead.”

When we refuse to give law-abiding citizens arms, and we ensure that the laws fail to give them an affirmative right of self-defense, we’re committing a peculiarly Darwinian experiment, one that sees us, as a society, do whatever we can to stamp out the genes of law-abiding citizens in favor of those people who engage in feral, murderous, amoral, and immoral behavior.

I posted it yesterday, but I’m going to post it again today. Please watch Elbert Guillory’s video on behalf of his Free At Last PAC, and please consider donating to the case. It’s time to counter the racist Leftist Darwinism, one that sees African-Americans a helpless, albeit periodically murderous subspecies, with tidal waves of well-founded faith in the brotherhood and equality of all people, regardless of race, color, creed (if their creed rejects religious totalitarianism), or national origin:

As you’ve probably realized, I have very limited access to news and the Internet on this vacation. My shipboard Internet plan gives me about five (very expensive) minutes a day, which is just enough to make sure I don’t have any emergencies in my inbox, to write to my family, and to post one article. Today, however, I got hold of a Canadian newspaper and got to see how President Obama once again stirred the racisim pot with his Zimmerman trial comments.

First, I should tell you my point of view: the verdict was entirely appropriate. The prosecution was unable to prove that Zimmerman did anything other than act in self-defense — and that was despite the judge’s decision to exclude all evidence about Trayvon’s thuggery, and the prosecution’s efforts to paint Zimmerman as a crazed, cop-wannabe racist.

The riots that followed the verdict were the logical outcome, not of a corruk racist jury verdict, but of the ground work laid by the professional race-baiters, Obama included. Obama continued that race-baiting with his comments following the trial.

You may recall that, when the killing went national, Obama opined that Trayvon, a drug using, gang-emulating slacker, could have been his son. I think Sasha and Malia were probably surprised to hear that, while they’ve been raised to be as good as gold and as pure as Ivory Soap, their imaginary brother would have been a thug.

Obama has now upped that rhetoric. In his latest foray, he announced that, 35 years ago, he himself could have been Martin. Apparently Obama’s youthful escapades with dope and “smack” were more serious than he let on. And maybe I wasn’t crazy when I surmised that, based upon pictures of Obama at Occidental, he had a coke nail.

As for the rest of his little talk, all Obama did was add fuel to the racial fire. He said that the judicial system is unfair to blacks, that there’s profiling, and that racism continues to corrupt our justice system. Way to go, Obama.

In a way, it seems that Obama is trying to finish the work Charles Manson started. As you may recall, Manson’s whole goal with that horrible night of Helter-Skelter murder was to start a race war between blacks and whites. He believed that war was a necessary predicate to a complete collapse of the American system, with Manson and his followers emerging as victors at the end. Obama, with his divisive talk, also seems intent upon sparking an America-ending race war, with the obvious belief that he and his apparatchiks will be the last men (and women) standing.

It’s going to be a long three and a half years until Obama’s reign of racial terror finally ends. I only hope that there’s something left standing when it’s all done.

Because this is Marin and I am not a hermit, I frequently find myself in conversation with Democrats. It was to be expected, therefore, that conversation over the Christmas holiday would end up revolving around gun control. These conversations were disheartening on all sides. My friends concluded that I support wild-eyed mass murderers, since I believe in the Second Amendment, and I concluded that their devotion to feelings over facts will result in many unnecessary deaths over the years.

As I explain at some length below, the only fact that matters to them is that guns do indeed kill people. Any other data is irrelevant. Indeed, the conversations were practically textbook illustrations of the giant chasm that separates the two world views.

I explained that semi-automatic still means you have to pull the trigger. I also explained that large magazines are a small convenience, but they don’t change the dynamics of shooting, because a practiced person can change clips in seconds (see the video above). I got shouted down before I could even point out that the Dunblane killer, who didn’t have large magazines, simply went into a gun-free zone with more weapons and ammunition. I also got shouted down when I said that the magazine size is pretty irrelevant if you’re in a gun-free zone. The counter to this was that the only reason to have a large magazine is to have a people killing gun.

Well, yes, I said. Imagine you’re in a riot, such as the 1992 Los Angeles Riots or the completely lawless situation after Hurricane Katrina or Hurricane Sandy. In those circumstances, you want to be over-armed, not under-armed. “Ha! So you admit it. You just want guns to kill people.” “No, they’re also fun for sport shooting. But the fact remains that, when you’re isolated and the mobs are coming, a gun with a good capacity is your only protection.” “Yeah, you want to kill people.” I realized at this point that I wouldn’t get any mileage out of saying that some people deserve killing — meaning that, if they’re coming to kill or rape me or mine, I don’t think I’d have second thoughts about valuing their lives at zero.

Shifting arguments, my friends bemoaned the fact that the NRA is so rich and powerful. If only there was an anti-gun lobby. They were taken aback when I out that the Brady Center is precisely that anti-gun organization. In other words, the NRA has not driven all other money or approaches out of the marketplace of ideas. Americans, though, have voted with their feet by voluntarily supporting the NRA rather than the Brady Center.

The next argument to emerge was that the only thing the Second Amendment allows is muskets. I countered that the Founders were good with words. If they’d wanted to limit the Amendment to muskets, they would have.

Well, you need a “militia” then, they asserted. No, I explained. We are all the militia. The Founders had just emerged from a lengthy battle against a tyrannical government with a standing army. They were able to engage this army only because, living as they did on a frontier far away from the motherland, ordinary citizens were generally armed and could therefore come together to stand against the government. The Founders wanted to protect against any future tyranny by ensuring that the nation’s own government was never able to turn against the people.

I also pointed out that the first thing the Nazis did was confiscate guns., The response was predictable, and can be distilled to “that can’t happen here.” I’m sure that’s what my dad’s family thought, probably right up until they entered the gas chambers.

Since my friends think the Second Amendment is a pointless relic, I suggested that they get rid of it through the amendment process. We should, they agreed — only the Red States would never allow it to happen. Neither would the Blue States, I muttered.

The response I got to that indubitable fact is that Britain has a much lower murder rate than America. This is true, but that’s an apples to oranges argument. Britain has always had a lower murder rate than America. When we at the effects of gun control on gun and other violence, we can’t reasonably compare Britain to America. Instead, we have to compare pre-gun control Britain to post-gun control Britain — and that comparison shows that gun control coincided perfectly with a vastly increased crime rate.

My interlocutors were also unimpressed by the fact that, if someone opens fire in a public place (meaning he’s planning a mass slaughter), the best lifesaver is a civilian with a concealed carry weapon. After all, the average police response time is measured in minutes. Even if the shooter doesn’t have a big magazine, when he’s the only one there who’s armed, nothing stops him until the police get there. If there is an armed civilian at the site of the shooting, however, and that civilian is neither crazed nor criminal, you usually end up with an intended mass shooting that becomes nothing but a small headline as the tragedy is limited to one or two, not scores. I understand that correlation is not causation, but I suspect that there’s a connection in America between the increase in concealed carry over the last 20 years and a corresponding decrease in gun crimes.

When I threw out data about police response times, the difference in numbers of dead when someone with a concealed carry weapon is present, and the decrease in gun crimes over the last two decades, the gun-control people scoffed at the data. “That can’t be true.” “Guns kill people.” “That doesn’t make sense.” “If we got rid of guns, fewer people would die.”

It was at this moment that I realized that there truly was a giant intellectual chasm between me and them. They can see only the people who died in the past, while I can count the ones who will live on into the future. To them, the body count is the only data that counts. To me, the statistical difference between those who die under a “gun control” regime and those who don’t die in a concealed carry environment, was the single most compelling piece of data out there.

Unlike my fellow Marinites, I realize that people are going to die under any circumstances. Even the gun-control people concede that gun control will not actually do away with guns. They’re just pretty sure it will decrease the number of guns overall — and to hell with the fact that this will be a lopsided decrease with law-abiding people ending up disarmed and lawless and crazy people ending up holding all the remaining arms. It’s the gun equivalent of the old saying that, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. In the land of the disarmed citizen, the armed, crazed criminal rules.

My goal is to create the circumstances in which the largest possible number of people live. My friends, however, believe that there is a Utopian future in which no people die. To the extent that they understand that guns kill people, and they have the body count to prove it, they want to outlaw guns. That data shows that outlawing guns results in more deaths is irrelevant to them. The one fact they know and accept with comfortable certainty is that those who have already died because of guns might still be alive today if those particular guns hadn’t been available on that day, in that time, at that place. Because this is the only fact that they can recognize, they focus obsessively on past deaths that could have been avoided with a few less guns, rather than projecting to future lives that, statistically, could certainly be saved with many more legal guns.

And as I said, I have absolutely no idea how to (a) get them to acknowledge that people will always die and (b) get them to understand that the best way to prevent future deaths isn’t to rehash old crimes but, rather, is to take the steps that are most likely to prevent future crimes.

Before I get to the winners from last week’s Watcher’s Council vote, I’d like to suggest that you toodle over to the Watcher’s of Weasels site yourself, to check out this week’s forum question: “Prediction — What Will Happen in the Trayvon Martin Case?” I had nothing to add, since everyone said things better than I could have, but you’ll find a nice selection of predictions, some of which you may like.

The San Jose Mercury News talked to fifteen teenage student journalists about issues ranging from texting while driving to Trayvon to politics. As journalists-in-training, these students are presumably better informed and more engaged than their peers. That presumption could be wrong.

The students’ responses to the Trayvon matter fascinated me because they were so grossly ill-informed. Their answers were all predicated on the original MSM narrative, one that saw a white cracker shoot an innocent black teenager. None had any idea that Zimmerman is a mixed-race man, or that the hard evidence supports Zimmerman’s claims that Trayvon was beating him vigorously (bloody head, broken nose, blackened eyes on Zimmerman, bloodied knuckles on Martin), or that he was correct in his concern that Trayvon was high (the autopsy revealed drugs in Trayvon’s system). Instead, these student “journalists” are as blinkered as the “real” journalists in whose footsteps they hope to follow:

Q: Are you and your friends talking about this controversial case? What has it taught you about race relations?

DeVera: People at my school are awfully ignorant about issues like this one that require a lot more interpersonal thinking. The masses at my school do not care, and it’s tragic that they don’t.

Daniel Wetherell, Athenian: Too many judgments were made with too little facts in this case.

Barger: So many people want to believe that we’re living in a post-racial society and that we don’t discriminate against each other. But something like this comes up, and it makes you realize that we’re not over any of it. If anything, we’re in the same place that we’ve been for quite some time.

Chavez: What’s it going to take for us to get past racism? It seems like we’ve done so much, and yet we’re nowhere near where we should be. And I think it’s really sad.

Ill-informed or not, these students find the current political scene disappointing. While one dutifully parroted the standard “War on Women” cant, and another said it was impossible for Obama to fix all the horrors that have descended upon him, two students are disappointed with the Great Black Hope. It was clear that they did originally think Obama was a “Magic Negro,” and they’re not coping well with the fact that he actually isn’t magic at all. These students couldn’t identify which of Obama’s tricks were failing to enthrall, but they’re pretty sure the whole show is a bust. As for the remaining two students questioned, they want more money for education, and are apparently unfazed by (or unaware of) both the State’s and the Nation’s massive deficits:

Q: Are you paying attention to the proceedings so far? If not, what would make you pay more attention? Are you pleased with President Obama’s performance?

Barger: I’ve never been more afraid to be a woman. Basically everything that has come out of (the Republican debates) is about restricting women’s reproductive rights, their social rights or putting them down because they work. I may want to move to another country.

Shalaka Gole, California High (San Ramon): My friends and I haven’t been following the (debates/election news). Last time, it was such a huge deal. You had a black man running. A woman running. It was exciting. Now, it’s kind of a letdown so far.

Erram: More talk about education would get me more interested. College tuition is rising constantly, and the financial burden on students has become ridiculous.

Zollner: Yes, more on education. There have been crazy budget cuts. Classes getting cut … I don’t like thinking that my government is taking money away from my education.

DeVera: I love politics. … I was on the Obama bandwagon big time last year. Now, I’m so dissuaded. I’ll probably still support him … but he’s way worse than I could ever imagine. Everyone one had this aura of hope around him. … But I feel like nothing has changed. He’s not really helped and, in fact, has made some things worse.

Gole: I’m not as disappointed. The situation Obama was handed was so crazy, so terrible. Just how much can he do? It’s not like he was given a magic wand when he became president.

When I look back on my high school self, I wasn’t any more informed than these kids are. I watched the (MSM) nightly news with my family, skimmed the newspaper headlines in the morning, and parroted my parents political views. I was mindlessly, ignorantly liberal. What’s sad is that, despite the massive inroads the new media is making, students in 2012 are precisely as knee-jerk and unaware as they were in 1979, when we didn’t have an alternative media to shine light into the darkness.

The one thing that is heartening is the fact that these youngsters are wising up to the fact that Obama is not a Messiah. It may take them a few years to figure out that he’s just the tip of the Leftist iceberg, but my hope is that, having been disappointed once by a demagogue, they’ll be wiser the next time around. Also, if they’re accurately reflecting their parents and their teachers’ attitudes (because we know that Bay Area teachers are improperly leaking politics into the classroom), Obama’s base is very lethargic. They won’t vote for Romney, but they might not have the energy to vote for Obama either.

For the MSM, the George Zimmerman thing has turned out to be a bust. With the exception of the fact that Trayvon Martin is still dead, everything the MSM first reported about the case has proven to be untrue. Right about now, you’d think that the media would be engaged in some soul-searching and apologizing, but that assumes that MSM members have souls and consciences. If you’ve made that assumption, you’ve proved, once again, that when you assume, you make an “ass” of “u” and “me.”

Because the media’s first effort at fomenting a race war seems to have failed, with only a few hapless white people suffering mob beat-downs, the MSM has gone back to the drawing board. The first effort in the “if at first you don’t succeed” strategy is a New York Times article about a killing in Georgia. Again, a white man shot a young black man. I hope you appreciate how beautifully the Times uses passive voice in the first paragraph (emphasis mine):

LYONS, Ga. — Norman Neesmith was sleeping in his home on a rural farm road here in onion country when a noise woke him up.

He grabbed the .22-caliber pistol he kept next to his bed and went to investigate. He found two young brothers who had been secretly invited to party with an 18-year-old relative he had raised like a daughter and her younger friend. The young people were paired up in separate bedrooms. There was marijuana and sex.

Over the course of the next confusing minutes on a January morning in 2011, there would be a struggle. The young men would make a terrified run for the door. Mr. Neesmith, who is 62 and white, fired four shots. One of them hit Justin Patterson, who was 22 and black.

The bullet pierced his side, and he died in Mr. Neesmith’s yard. His younger brother, Sha’von, then 18, ran through the onion fields in the dark, frantically trying to call his mother.

The dead boy’s parents are wondering why they didn’t get the full Al Sharpton treatment. Reading through the article, you discover that there are two reasons. First, a year ago, when this tragedy unfolded, Al Sharpton and his cadre hadn’t yet figured out that they could get substantial mileage out of a white on black killing. Second, it’s too late now, because the actual facts are out there, and they don’t leave either the race hustlers or the MSM much with which to work. Even the Times acknowledges that the known facts run counter to the “white people are murderous KKK/Nazi killers” meme:

Still, like so many other crimes where race might be a factor, this one is not so clear-cut. Mr. Neesmith says he felt threatened. He says he aches for the parents but believes none of this would have happened if the young men had not been in his house when they should not have been.

“I think about it every day. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever been through,” Mr. Neesmith said as he stood in the doorway of his home. “In two minutes it just went bad. If you ain’t never shot nobody, you don’t want to do it, I’m telling you.”

In the backyard, a pool was ready for neighborhood kids — both black and white — who he said loved to come over after school for a swim. Mr. Neesmith, a former school bus driver, and his late wife had been foster parents to dozens of children.

They took in a great-niece, who has a black parent, when she was a baby. She is now 19 and admitted to investigators that she invited Justin Patterson to their trailer home that night, timing it so Mr. Neesmith would be asleep. The two had been flirting on Facebook and in texts.

When Mr. Neesmith pulled the young men out of the bedrooms, he threatened to call the younger girl’s grandfather, according to court documents and interviews. He asked the two, who both have young daughters, why they were not home with their children. He ranted and waved the gun around.

So the brothers made a run for it. By all accounts, while the younger one struggled to unlock a side door, the older one shoved Mr. Neesmith.

Let me summarize those unclear facts: Neesmith has raised a half-black child (or would she be white/black?) and his home was a meeting spot for both black and white youngsters. He thought he had a break-in (explaining the gun), then he noticed that the child he was raising was doing sex and illegal drugs in his home (explaining the anger), and then one of the two young men (i.e., not one weeny little guy, but two young men) in his home started pushing him around. Further investigation showed that the other girl was 14, adding statutory rape to the illegal conduct within his house.

Given these facts, why in the world does the Times say, “like so many other crimes where race might be a factor”? (And equally importantly, why doesn’t the Times say, more correctly, “As with some many other crimes in which race might be a factor”?) It turns out that the Times had to do some reaching:

That race played a significant part is not hard to imagine here in a county that was named after Robert Toombs, a general and one of the organizers of the Confederate government. A black woman has never been named Miss Vidalia Onion in the annual festival that begins Thursday. And until last year in neighboring Montgomery County, there were two proms — one for whites and one for blacks.

What!? No black Miss Vidalia Onion? My God! The whole county should be sent to jail. And separate proms? Well, clearly a white person is going to kill a black person. Especially a white person who is raising a black-white person.

With too much time having passed by, and too many facts instantly available in a small Georgia community, Al Sharpton and the MSM race hustlers never had a chance. The bereaved parents will have to mourn their child’s passing without benefit of race riots on his behalf.

Incidentally, I’ve been paying attention over the past couple of weeks to the crime stories in the San Francisco Chronicle. Sadly, they have included several reports tell about people of color who were shot,* one while he was pushing his child’s stroller. Strangely, none of these stories have excited comment in the larger, national media, nor has Al Sharpton dropped by to offer his condolences. I leave you to figure out why the telling silence.

___________________________

*Oceanview is a primarily minority neighborhood, so I’m making an educated guess that the man who was shot was a minority.

The post title, of course, is a quotation from President Obama, who couldn’t resist wading into, and personalizing, an already inflamed faux racial issue. Maybe if Obama had a son, he’d sound like Trayvon, too.

The usual crowd of race hustlers, including Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the New Black Panthers and Barack Obama, have been making as much hay as possible out of Trayvon Martin’s death. Clearly, they think that this episode has ballot potential in November. I can see only one way in which it does have that potential, and I’ll get to that in a minute. But first, a few reasons why I think their ham-handed attempt to paint America as a racist nation will be a bust.

First, in terms of characterizing America as a racist nation, the fact that we have a black president kind of, sort of, a little bit, makes it stupid to try to paint a whole nation with the “racism” brush just because a big Hispanic man in a bad neighborhood pulled a gun on a big black guy in the same neighborhood. That’s true whether the killing was motivated by self-defense, insanity, or racism.

Second, people are beginning to catch on to the media’s games. In a way, it’s useful that the Martin killing followed on the heels of the Toulouse massacre. It’s a reminder that the media has a few templates for murder: When a black person dies at the hands of a non-black person, it’s a front-page racially motivated crime. When a non-black person dies at the hands of black person, it’s a bottom of page 27 story. And when a Muslim kills people while shouting “Allah is great,” Islam has nothing to do with it. Here, the media is sticking to its narrative with regard to both the Martin and Mohammed stories, despite pesky little details that put the lie to the media narratives.

Third, this was a one-person crime. Zimmerman didn’t belong to a White (or Hispanic) Supremacist movement. He wasn’t a corrupt small town sheriff. This wasn’t just another in a long line of racially motivated murders in the same community. It’s awfully hard to make a serious case for institutional American racism based on a sordid neighborhood dispute.

Fourth, crying “racism” is losing its impact. I read the other day (and I can’t remember where) that every time the President dips into the strategic oil reserves, the price of fuel drops. But here’s the kicker: With each successive release of oil from the reserves, the price drop has less staying power than it did during the previous release. Within an ever shorter time, fuel prices return to the price at which they were before the President used the reserves. In other words, the market is getting smarter at recognizing that the sudden influx of oil is a Band-Aid fix that doesn’t repair the deep problems with our oil supplies — so prices remain the same. With the racism cry, there’s a similar phenomenon: Americans are getting smarter at recognizing that the sudden screams of racism have nothing to do with the fact that America is, overall, a non-racist country, something that is true regardless of pockets of racism that may pop out here and there.

There you have it: four very good reasons why the bleats of “racism” are not going to convince Americans that they are still deeply racist and that they must reelect Barack Obama to continue to expiate their sin.

However, I’m not sure directing manifestly false insults at the America people is really going on here. I think the New Black Panthers gave the real game away when the announced a bounty on Zimmerman’s head (dead or alive.) What the race hustlers are telling Americans is that, if they don’t reelect Barack Obama, there’s going to be rioting on the streets, and that those who haven’t gotten with the pro-race program, can expect to have a bounty placed on their heads (dead or alive).

Sequestered here on the Left Coast I hadn’t paid any attention to the Trayvon Martin murder. Today, though, it forced itself into the forefront of my brain. As the media spins the story, it’s a horrific case of a very wholesome, very young black man cruelly executed in a “safe,” “white” neighborhood by a ferocious non-black man (sold by some as white, admitted by others to be Hispanic), with the man clearly acting in a racial fury.

Here are reports on some other racial fury the story, as the media sold it, has stirred:

What’s missing from all this racial hysteria in Obama’s America is the truth. I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that the truth does not involve a wholesome black boy, in a “safe,” “white” neighborhood, randomly killed for being black by a non-black man. Instead, the truth involves a very large black kid on a five day suspension from school, in a dangerous, mixed-race neighborhood, pounding a Hispanic man into the ground. Whether the Hispanic man was sufficiently in fear of his life to justify a self-defense shooting remains to be seen. What’s clear, though, is that the media narrative is a lie.

I leave it to all of you to figure out why this story was the platform for the big lies. Is Obama’s base quietly deserting him? I don’t think the numbers support that. Is the media trying to deflect attention from more significant stories about Obama Administration failures and malfeasance? This seems like a peculiar way to go about it. Were Sharpton and Farrakhan bored and looking to stir things up a little? That, actually, I can believe. These men are increasingly marginalized by the younger generation of agitators. Perhaps these are the last roars of the old lions.

“If I had a son he would have looked like Treyvon,” Obama said shortly, addressing the victim’s parents. “I think they are right to expect that all of us as Americans are going to take this with the seriousness that this deserves and that we’re going to get to the bottom of exactly what happened.”

Obama is now, and always will be, a racist: that is, he views everything through a racial prism, and seems unable to believe or understand that, for most people, race is only one small part of the myriad biological, genetic, and social factors that make them who they are and that guide what they do.